The 3 Mccaws

[Bob Miller]

I took this at an australian zoo during a flight demo. I was amazed that i got all three in relatively good focus. Should i drop in a better sky? How does vignette look?
Nikon D-300
200-400 Hand held
1/1000 sec at f 5.6
ISO 400

[Doug Brown]

Hi Bob. Good job getting all 3 birds in focus with good eye contact and nice wing position. Can't say I'm a big fan of the vignette. I would move the birds slightly to the right in the frame. And I'd also warm up the color temperature a little; things are looking a little blue as presented.

[Kerry Perkins]

Nice job indeed Bob! That's an excellent example of getting the most out of a shallow DOF. Very colorful and I love the dorsal flight view times three! Good suggestions by Doug to make it even stronger. High five for sure.

[John Chardine]

Hi Bob- It's great when this happens! But it's rare (head angles and all in focus that is). Depending on your focal length and distance to subject you could have had a decent depth of field. I did some sleuthing of the image with Bridge and found out your focal length was 350mm and your subject distance was 98ft (29.9m). I went to one of many DoF calculators on the net:

http://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html

and the results are shown here. You had a little over 5ft (1.6m) of DoF in this situation, which is not much at about 100ft.

DoF increases exponentially with distance to subject and linearly with f-number.

[Kerry Perkins]

Thanks John! I didn't realize the birds were that far away.

[Jeff Cashdollar]

Bob,

They appear to close in the frame and they were - nice data John.
Agree with Doug regarding backing down the blue by warming or desaturating. Great job framing all three - well done.

[Bob Miller]

Hi John...thanks for the dof calculations. I immediately checked my metadata and found the following subject distance was 29.90 m or 89.70ft
focal length was 350 mm.
I feel even luckier!